Читать книгу Cops, Crocs & Leopard-Skin Jocks - Bob Magor - Страница 11

That night had a party atmosphere with the family there. Anne took over the kitchen with lenice. al an and I cracked a beer. Roy had his usual lemon squash and Kimberley ran amok trying to get some attention amongst all the animated talk.

When I got them all on track I heard that during the ‘60s and ‘70s Roy was really a lost soul. A smattering of six years schooling wasn’t likely to give him a wide choice of career paths. Like the majority of lads of that time he could only expect to be a labourer. But he always had big ideas for himself. He could be a good worker if he wanted to be. He was strong, shrewd in a lot of respects, street smart and a survivor. All he had to do was find his niche. He had to keep looking.

‘I said my goodbyes to my girlfriend Joanna and my new found mates and headed for Broome,’ Roy reminisced as he settled back in his ever complaining chair. ‘The road was just a dirt track and I had a bit of a problem near Anna Plains, just above where Sandfire Roadhouse is these days. I came over a crest and there were a heap of cattle lying half asleep in the middle of the track. I saw them a bit late and they didn’t see me at all. The next thing I knew I’d hit one. As I ploughed into their bedroom I did a fair bit of damage to the first cow and also to my beautiful Customline. I have been known to react before I put my brain into gear and this time was no exception. I grabbed my rifle and shot the wounded cow. But I was still mad … so I shot three more!

When the gunsmoke cleared I thought, ‘ Shit! What have I done? ‘ Thinking quickly, I grabbed an old axe from the boot and broke a couple of legs of each dead animal with the back of the axe. The next vehicle that came along, perhaps the owner of the cattle, would think what a kind chap I was putting these poor, suffering animals out of their misery. With a clear conscience I limped on towards Broome.

‘Ah, Broome in the ‘60s,’ Roy sighed. ‘What an idyllic place. There again, when I went back on that trip in ‘76, I couldn’t believe it. I bought myself a handline and some bait and went out on the Broome jetty. There were hundreds of tourists there with cameras around their necks. I threw the bait over the edge followed by my line and never went back. It wasn’t the Broome that I remembered. I was sure disillusioned. That’s why I love where I live these days. Peace.

‘Broome then was a beautiful multicultural town. There were whitefellas, blackfellas, Chinese, Japanese, Malay and mixtures of some or all of them. Everyone did their own thing and everybody got on. They all had their own customs and tucker and I loved it because it was laid back and you could get away with almost anything. I remember going to a Chinese joint one day with two bob and winning twenty pounds on kudja kudja. That’s their version of dominos. I didn’t know much about it. I just put my money where someone who was winning put his.

‘When I was first in Broome my best clothes were a pair of leopard skin underpants. They weren’t real leopard skin of course – just the pattern. Being a lair, I wore them around the streets and shops and in the pub. They really got the girls in. They looked like bathers and became my trademark. Naturally I didn’t work in them. They were just my best going out clobber. No-one cared. That was the old Broome.

‘Joanna was back in Port Hedland and I’d been hooking up with black girls for a while. In fact I never had a white girl after I left South Australia. This is something I’ve been completely comfortable with all my life. When I got to the Top End it became almost compulsory. I remember many years later when Annie here asked me the reason why I loved black girls, she looked shocked when I said it was because you never saw the varicose veins on the backs of their legs.’

‘You’ve always been hopeless, you big log,’ Anne grinned lovingly at her brother.

‘I couldn’t think of any other excuse,’ Roy laughed. ‘The real reason is probably because the young ones are plentiful and pretty. Anyway, over the years no white woman would have put up with me.

‘While I was in Broome I lived with the Aborigines again. It just seemed to be the natural thing to do. I teamed up with a girl by the name of Angie James. We eventually had the first child that I ever knew about. A girl called Josephine. I haven’t seen her for years but she always rings up every few months to see how I’m going. She’s a lovely girl. Must take after her mother!

‘I started working on the wharf in Broome and that was a good lurk. It’s strange that I could never take a job at face value. There always had to be an angle. It was a typical wharf situation where anything that wasn’t nailed down, and a few things that were, would get knocked off on a regular basis. This was my sort of job. The State boats delivered everything for the town the same as they did at Derby because there were no road deliveries. The roads were a joke so no-one in their right mind would take a truck up there on a regular basis. Anyway, the boats were quicker. I’d be down in the hold loading freight into slings and other blokes would swing the load up onto the wharf. You worked for half an hour and had twenty minutes off. It was a shame to take the money!

‘Because I always worked on the “give me an inch I’ll take a mile” theory, it wasn’t long before I went overboard with the pilfering and got the sack. The local businesses smelt a rat when half their order didn’t turn up on a regular basis. It didn’t take them long to find the rat.

‘After that I got a job as a yardman in a Broome pub. That worked out okay because one of my jobs was to mop the bar out at 5am. The pub used to sell little flat bottles of rum. I’d lift a few and smuggle them out past the boss in the mop bucket full of dirty water. I’d water it down and make two bottles to flog to the blackfellas for a huge profit. Well, it was 100% profit!

‘Later on in my Broome days I’d go to the pub and buy a flagon of plonk. Then I’d find some empty bottles and make six bottles – half plonk and half water. The blackfellas were happy to pay a quid a bottle for my brew and I survived like that for quite a while. My Broome days were from 1960 until the end of 1963. I know that because I’ve got “Angie 63” tattooed on my leg. I’m a walking calendar.

‘Before we had the baby, Angie and I were living in a tent and when I won my kudja kudja money I bought an old kerosene fridge to go in it. I thought I was a king.

‘I had a big scare in Broome though. By this time I was living in the old bank building in the main street. I got into a fight with a big blackfella in town. He was bigger and older than me. I was about twenty-three and he was about thirty-eight but he’d been drinking so that took the edge off him. We were into it hammer and tongs in the street when this young blackfella ran up. He must have been a relation of my opponent because he threw a fighting stick at me but fortunately it missed and it hit the department store window behind me. It bounced back so I grabbed it and chased the bastard. I was lean in those days and could run like hell.

‘When I caught up to him I ran up alongside and laid it across his head. The force of the blow dropped him but he sprang to his feet and took off. As he ran away, all I could see in the moonlight was a white piece of bone. I’d opened his hair up and exposed a heap of skull. When I saw that I panicked. I ran to the cop shop and told the cop on duty I’d just killed a bloke. I was actually crying telling the cop about it.

‘We went back but there was no-one there. We searched the backstreets for an hour but in the end we gave up. For weeks after that the blackfellas would come around in the dark and rattle their sticks on the corrugated iron fence. It made quite a racket in the humid night. I never had any physical trouble from the nightly visits but I was a bit worried for a while knowing that the gang was out there. Eventually they got sick of it and stopped. I’d seen enough of the lad to recognise him if I ever saw him again but I never set eyes on him. I kept looking for him around the streets and checking for someone with a big bandage around their head but I never saw him. Perhaps he cleared out bush or perhaps he died. All I know was that it was a very traumatic time in my life.

‘I didn’t want to leave Broome but I had to when I eventually caught my usual disease – bloody coppers. I decided that the only cure was to take a holiday. I hadn’t seen anything of the Territory, so I decided to take a drive in my Customline. It was starting to show signs of a hard life but it still ran well. My mate Norman Munro decided to come for some sightseeing, and other friends Theresa Torrence and her boyfriend came along for the ride as well. We motored and camped our way across to Katherine checking out all the sights on the way. We felt like bloody tourists!

‘Instead of staying on the main highway we decided to see some real bush and turned off the Stuart Highway heading for Top Springs. The Buchanan Highway had just been completed so it wasn’t a bad road. We refuelled at Top Springs but between there and Wave Hill the car shit itself. Even though it was a new road there was very little traffic in those days so we were stranded and we didn’t know for how long. We hadn’t passed a car in two days because it was only used for the station people heading into civilisation on their rare breaks. This was before the damn tourists began to rip around every outback track in their big four-wheel drives pretending to be explorers.

‘Looking back we were fairly stupid because we had very little water on board. We all had a little drink and Munro said, “Come on. We’ll walk to a bore and get some more. There must be one around here somewhere because the cattle have to drink and we’ve seen lots of cattle pads.” Like idiots the two of us took the water bag and began to walk. Theresa and her boyfriend decided to stay with the car so if anyone came along they could tell them where to find us.

‘I started to lose interest in sightseeing as Day One came and went. It was bloody hot and we saw nothing that resembled a water hole. Just heat and flies. Millions of bloody flies. There were lots of cattle tracks but they didn’t appear to be going anywhere specific. Usually when tracks get near water they start to join up and become bigger tracks. We had hats on but the heat seemed to have burned through them and dried out our brains. Our meagre supply of water had run out mid-afternoon and we discussed following our tracks back to the car. We decided against it. We had no water to give them when we got back so we’d all just die of thirst together. No. We had to keep searching.

‘It was an uneasy sleep in the dirt but we rested all that night. Rest didn’t help because Day Two began to get painful. That afternoon I said to Munro, “I’m stuffed. I can’t keep going.”

Munro replied, “We have to. There must be water around because we’ve seen cattle and they must be drinking somewhere near.”

But I was rooted. “I can’t go on,” I gasped again. Munro looked around and found a little stone.

‘ “Here. Suck this,” he said as he handed it to me. “It will stop you feeling thirsty. Suck it you weak bastard.”

‘The abuse and the stone certainly did the trick for half an hour or so and then I hit the wall again. “I’m stuffed,” I croaked, “My legs are stuffed and I’m thirsty. I can’t go any further. You go on. I’ll stay here and die.” I still had the stone in my mouth but it wasn’t creating saliva any more. My head throbbed, my whole body had begun to shut down, my legs felt numb and I was dropping backwards and forwards into unconsciousness. I knew my end was near.

‘Munro began to abuse me again but I just didn’t care any more. As he stood there squinting into the sun he said, “Look. I can see the fan of a windmill in the distance.”

‘ “Get stuffed,” I croaked. “I’m not falling for that one.” I dropped into the orange dirt.

‘ “No, it’s true,” he yelled excitedly. “I can see it about two miles away.”

‘He sat me up and I squinted into the distance. It was there all right. I wasn’t sure if it was a mirage or not but it sure got me going again. It seemed to take half a day to get there with Munro half-dragging me along. As we got closer we could see it definitely wasn’t a mirage and it wasn’t a tank. It was just a big hole in the ground that the water pumped into from the windmill. It was pretty grotty from the cattle and animals that had drunk and shat in it over the years but it was the best and sweetest water I’d ever tasted. I drank and drank. Then I spewed and spewed. Then I drank and drank again. Then I spewed again. What a bloody performance! But I didn’t care.

‘While we were lying in the water we heard a noise. We looked up to see a Blitz truck coming in our direction. The windmill was right on the edge of the road so Munro had no trouble flagging it down. Our salvation was complete. We reckoned that only the good die young, so there was the reason we were saved!

‘We filled up the waterbag and they gave us a lift back to our car. The other two weren’t too bad because they hadn’t been walking for two days, but they sure enjoyed a drink of that crappy water. The blokes in the Blitz took us to Top Springs and dropped us off.

‘Old Ma Hawkes was the tough old bird who ran the pub there. I had my swag with my rifle poked through the strap. I’m not sure whether she’d heard of me or just didn’t like the look of me and my rifle because she contacted the Katherine coppers. They turned up later that day and looked us over. They decided to take the other three to Katherine but not me because I was pretty weak and they didn’t think I should travel. They told Ma I should stay there and rest.

‘She wasn’t too impressed with this idea, especially when Munro decided that he’d stay with me. She could see that we were just going to hang around with no money and no nothing so Ma rang Roy Harvey, the Wave Hill copper, and said politely, “I want this arsehole out the way!” She had a way with words, old Ma.

‘Roy Harvey came down to sort things out. He took my gun and threw it on the back seat of the Willys jeep he was driving. We went back into the pub and a couple of hours later a stock inspector called in to wet his throat as he passed. He was heading back to the Stuart Highway and was happy to give us a lift for company. He’d decided to have a couple of drinks with the copper before he went so I sneaked out and got my rifle from the copper’s jeep and rolled it up inside my swag instead of through the strap.

‘The stock inspector gave us lift into Dunmarra, where we hitched a ride to Katherine and eventually back to Broome. It had been a bigger adventure than we’d anticipated and it was the only time in all my outback life that I looked like dying of thirst. Norman Munro definitely saved my life on that trip just by making me put a stone in my mouth. I was ready to give up. I was absolutely rooted.

‘We lobbed back in Broome with a story to tell and me without a car. Nothing had changed but a familiar pattern began to emerge. I began to be a nuisance again and the police started paying me lots of attention. I went to gaol a few times for fighting and I was also arrested for cohabiting with the Aboriginals. That was a crime in those days. They were trying to stop a half-caste race from evolving but that was really a lost cause. I don’t know why they tried because half the blokes in the Top End and the Kimberley lived with black women. There weren’t very many white ones so, unless you became a monk, there wasn’t much alternative.

‘I’d earned a reputation as the “Kingpin of Broome”, which made me a target with the local coppers all the time. It also made me a target for any bloke full of booze or a blow-in who wanted to top up his own reputation by having a go at me. Eventually they got me before a magistrate, who looked at my long list of convictions around Australia and shook his head.

‘ “We can do without your type in town,” he said. With that he gave me the ultimatum of six months in gaol, or thirty days to leave town and never to return above the 26th parallel. That was somewhere around Carnarvon. I agreed to the latter. Never being good with directions, when I left town I went to Derby instead of heading south. There was still lots of country I hadn’t seen.’

It was a great night between Anne’s expertise in the galley and a number of beers thanks to Allan. I think they have more stars in the bush because I’d never seen more. The warm night air was so humid you could almost eat it with a fork so getting to sleep in my swag was going to be a chore.

Rest suddenly became important when Roy’s voice broke the ambience. ‘We’re catching the 6.30 tide in the morning. There’s a slab of horse meat in the meat-house to cut up for crab bait so if you don’t get an early start you’ll miss breakfast!’ The last part of his statement was directed at me.

Welcome to the real world, I thought. It wasn’t much fun being a slave!